Capital Plumbing ranks on page 1 of Google for 3 out of 10 high-intent local keywords — and most of those are for your own brand name. For the money keywords ("plumber wellington", "emergency plumber wellington", "hot water repair"), you're buried on pages 4–8 while Wellington Pipe Pros sits at #1–#3 for all of them.
Where you sit on Google right now for the 10 keywords that actually produce work in Wellington. Compared against your top local competitor.
The specific reasons Google ranks your competitors above you. Each one is fixable — most within 30 days.
You have one "Services" page for all of Wellington. Your top competitor has 14 suburb-specific pages — "plumber kelburn", "plumber karori", "plumber island bay", etc. Google treats each one as a separate ranking opportunity. You're competing for one spot; they're competing for 14.
Google uses backlinks from other trusted local sites as a ranking signal. Wellington Pipe Pros has 47 local backlinks (Yellow Pages, NoCowboys, local business directories, Neighbourly, Trade Me trades). You have 4. That's a 10× gap Google reads as "they matter, you don't".
Google treats stale sites as dormant. Your competitor publishes 2–4 posts a month on common plumbing problems ("why is my hot water tepid", "how much does a new cylinder cost"). Those posts rank for long-tail searches AND signal to Google that the site is actively maintained. You're losing that ranking signal entirely.
Your sitemap.xml returns a 404 and you have no LocalBusiness schema. Google has to guess what your business does and where it operates. Your competitor's schema tells Google the exact service areas, business hours, review rating, and accepted payment methods — which is why they get rich results and you don't.
Your homepage title is "Capital Plumbing - Home". Google's ranking algorithm heavily weights the title tag. Your competitor's homepage title is "Wellington Plumber | 24/7 Emergency | Wellington Pipe Pros". Same page type, completely different ranking power.
Ranked by how quickly you'd see ranking improvements. Start with Quick Wins — you could climb 20+ positions on 5 keywords inside 30 days.
2–3 days · 20+ rank jumps possible
3–4 weeks · long-term ranking
Weekly · stacks forever
Every keyword, ranking, and competitor above is fictional. If you want a real keyword audit of your actual local market — delivered in 24 hours, free — request one below.